Wednesday, February 11, 2015

First, an announcement: I am officially going to be at HeroesCon in beautiful Charlotte, NC from June 19-21. This will be my only convention appearance in support of Nonplayer 2, and I'm very excited about it. I got a table and everything, just like a real grown-up comic book artist.

The guy Rico who works over at Heroes is especially cool. If you meet him, give him a vigorous handshake on my behalf and maybe let it linger just a little too long. Let him be the one to disengage. Or if he rides it out, just hang on until the sweat from both your palms makes it impossible to maintain a firm grip.

This week, I pulled the dusty sheet off of the old Nonplayer promotional machinery and started contacting retailers to tell them about the reprint of #1 and the release of #2 (which, I should add, has been delayed until June -- the #1 reprint is still in April).

I don't know how effective my pitch is -- I am offering a free signed poster and a preview PDF of Nonplayer #2 to any retailer who gets in touch with me, and I've now gotten a fair number of replies. So good old email seems to work okay. But my contact list is now three years old, and sadly, a lot of comic shops have disappeared over the years. And of course new ones have popped up, but I have no contact info for most of them.

Since I'm hip to the jive and into what the kids are doing, I attempted to augment the email campaign with some tweeting. Gotta say, not really sure what I'm doing there. There seem to be times of day when people are reading, but the only way to guarantee visibility is to kinda spam everybody all day. Which feels super gross and annoying. That said, I added maybe half a dozen new shops to my contact list this way, and that's not nothing!

By the way, if you happen to know a retailer who wants in on this free signed poster/early access PDF deal, feel free to forward the official Nonplayer email address to them (nonplayercomic at that one really huge company that starts with a G). Especially if you know of any new shops, please send them my way. I have no way of knowing about Annie's Boutique Comics and Artisanal Tart Hut in Boise unless you tell me about it.

Thankfully, the retailers that have gotten back to me have all been super nice and supportive. I had assumed kind of a defensive crouch after hitting send on that first email, but I have at time of writing not received a single disgruntled reply. I'd have expected retailers, of all people, to be exasperated by the delay, but they all seemed to be aware of the various setbacks I went through and excited that there was finally something new on the horizon.

So comics retailers are actually not like Comic Book Guy at all. They all LOOK like him, but they're quite nice, personality-wise.

What else? Oh yeah! Posters!

First, I'm printing up a new 11"x17" poster for Nonplayer 2, which I'll be selling at HeroesCon, as well as though my online store (which will be back online soon). This is also the poster I'm sending to retailers:

I also bit the bullet and did a run of BIG (30"x24") posters that look like this:

I hope they sell, because dang, they weren't cheap to print. I will also be selling these at HeroesCon and maybe through my online store, if I can figure out an economical way of shipping something so huge. I am nervous about how much I've spent to print these, so if you want to give me something really nice this year, buy a big poster. It's for a good cause, which is the cause of me not being broke and not having a garage full of gigantic posters.